that's how the story goes
by altschmerz
Summary: Jack Wilder and Lula May and a Friday night power outage. Trading information for points in card games, they discover shared heritage, leading the two youngest Horsemen to stand around a darkened kitchen table in an Eye apartment, trying to remember the blessings for lighting candles on Shabbat. (ktavnukkah day 2, 'light')


3/4 of the horsemen are played by jewish actors godbless.

happy hanukkah and happy finals, friends!

not written with a shippy angle in mind but if that's YOUR angle i won't stop you!

* * *

"What's your favorite color?"

"Really?" Jack raises his eyebrows at her, grinning over his losing hand of Go Fish. "You're wasting your question on _that_? Lowballing it a little, don't you think?"

"Hey, listen, this was your idea," Lula says, crossing her arms and making a face at Jack. Her own cards, sans a four to match the pairless one he'd had, are forgotten, tucked against her side. "If you don't like it, we-"

"Green."

Lula stills her movement towards defensiveness, a slight smile pulling at her mouth. "Green?"

"But not, like, regular green. It's gotta be a really dark green. Like pine needles. That's my favorite color." Jack grins at her and shrugs because while he was speaking, he figured out why she'd asked.

There's a necklace he wears sometimes, a small stone of deep, forest green. When she sees him wear it now, Lula will know something of why he wears it.

They don't know each other very well, really. That is the conclusion Jack and Lula came to, while the others out running some important Eye errand they hadn't been needed for. They had turned on the tv in the living room of the large apartment they were presently laying low in, intending to pass the time. That was how the conversation started. Jack had mentioned that, though he liked stand-up, he wasn't fond of sit-coms like the one playing.

Then the power went out, and in her search for something to do, Lula had spotted the cards sticking out of his pocket, and an idea sprang on her, and she'd jumped on it before giving herself time to decide it was a bad one. Jack had accepted her proposed terms of playing card games in exchange for information, which is how they'd got to where they are now, playing Go Fish and answering questions instead of drawing from the pile when you didn't have the requested card.

"Do you have any Kings?" Lula asks.

"Go Fish."

" _Damn_."

"Hah!" Jack crows. "What's your middle name?"

Lula frowns at him for a second before answering. "The one I picked or the one my parents gave me?" There's bravado in her counter-question, but it's thin. Anxiety hangs behind it, cloying and heavy. Jack follows her lead and pauses as well before responding. He tilts his head to one side and smiles, just slightly.

"The one you picked, of course. I asked what your name was didn't I?"

She smiles as well in response, relieved. "Judith," she says, blushing a little. It's too dark for him to see though, their area of the living room floor lit only by an open laptop on the coffee table, otherwise useless without an internet connection.

"Lula Judith May," Jack tries, then nods. "I like it, you did a nice job."

"You ever think about changing your name?"

Jack waves a finger at her. "That's not the rules, you've gotta win first."

With a glare he can definitely see, Lula huffs out a breath. "Fine. Your turn."

They proceed like that for a little while longer, Go Fish unsustainable when played without the traditional pile-drawing method, and pretty boring aside. The game changes from Go Fish to a test of accuracy, flicking cards at the bottom half of the calendar hanging on the wall, answering a question every time you miss.

Jack of course has the upper hand on that one, quickly gathering Lula's birthday, her hometown, the fact that she had no brothers or sisters. He learns that a friend she worked at a coffee shop with taught her how to ride a motorcycle, that she's afraid of swimming in the ocean, and that she's never driven in snow.

When she protests that the odds are stacked rather unfairly in that sort of competition, Jack graciously lets her pick the next one. She chooses a bastardized type of five card draw, and solidly trounces him. Over the course of that game Lula gets out of Jack _his_ middle name (Christopher), that he's allergic to strawberries, has never seen or read Harry Potter, and that he taught himself to crochet off YouTube videos.

Eventually it devolves from competing, using information as chips in poker games, to Jack and Lula sitting on the floor firing questions back and forth and answering them just as quickly. It started with smaller stuff, favorite colors and middle names, are you allergic to anything, are you an only child? It turned as time went on to more personal questions, things not quite so easily answered.

"Do you wish you could see your family?" Lula asks him, eyes focused on him but not staring, observing because she's interested in the answer, rather than studying him like a science experiment. Jack thinks about what she'd said the day they met, about families, and answers honestly. Why bother breaking the trend now, when he hasn't lied yet.

"The Horsemen are my family." Jack tries to sound as confident as possible, as sure of what he's saying as he can be. "Do _you_?"

"No." It doesn't seem like Lula has to even _try_ , the answer solid and flinty. Her next question comes as quickly as her reply had. "Do you miss Henley?"

"All the time."

The conversation stills for a few moments until Jack, who sits leant back against the sofa with his arms clasped loosely around his shins, asks another question. His voice is quiet and easy, gentle curiosity rather than accusatory mocking.

"Why did you kiss me? On New Years?"

Lula pulls a face, groaning and flopping onto her back on the carpet. She shakes her head, hair moving over the carpet fibers with a _schff-schff_ sound.

"Not that I, y'know, _minded_ ," Jack says, shifting to the side to get a better look at her new vantage point. "You don't have to answer. If you don't want."

A few long seconds drag on wherein Jack is convinced Lula is going to take his offer, until she speaks again. She sounds a little embarrassed, the feeling masked enough that, had they not spent as much time in close quarters as they had in recent weeks, he wouldn't have been able to pick up on it at all.

"Because, y'know, that's what you _do_."

"What you do."

" _Yeah_ ," Lula huffs. "I kissed you because- because you were pretty and there and it was New Year's and that's- that's how the _story_ goes."

"The story."

"Are you just going to keep repeating shit I say or what?" She sounds half irritated, but Jack doesn't take it personally. He shrugs affably and keeps silent, allowing her to elaborate at her own time. "The _story_. In the movies, in the shows, in all the stories, everybody has a role to play. A job, a- something they're supposed to do, a script for them to follow. Merritt's the comic relief, Danny's the hotshot leader, Dylan's the mastermind, you're the plucky young rogue, and I'm- I'm the new girl. I'm the wildcard, and you're pretty, and I'm pretty, and- That's how it _goes_. I kissed you because that's what the story is, and it made sense." One hand lifts off the carpet and arcs lazily through the air, a 'what can you do' kind of gesture. "I've always followed the story, ever since I was a kid. I wanted to wear a yarmulke for my bat mitzvah but, like, girls don't do that, so I didn't. It wouldn't've followed the story."

There are any number of things Jack could've focused on out of that, but one detail in particular sticks. "Wait, bat mitzvah?"

"Yeah, I-"

"Me too!"

Now Lula sits up, eyebrows up and the beginning of laughter bubbling up behind her reply. "Oh no shit? You're Jewish?"

"Yeah! So's Danny," Jack tells her, and now Lula does laugh, slumped over propped on one hand, the other clapped over her eyes, shoulders shaking and casting weird shadows on the wall behind her. She seems like she's about to say something else when suddenly the light casting the shadows winks out. The computer has finally died, leaving Jack and Lula in an apartment illuminated solely by the moon outside the window.

A few beats of silence reign over the room until Lula speaks, a non-sequitur to Jack's point of view.

"...It's Friday, isn't it?"

"Yeah," he confirms, confused. "Why?"

"Did your family ever do Shabbat candles?"

A couple minutes and a scramble through the kitchen lands Jack and Lula standing by the kitchen table with a matchbook, a tea light, and a scented votive candle that probably belonged to Merritt.

"Okay, okay, we gotta do this right, what's the candle prayer?" Lula's question is met by a blank stare from Jack, barely visible in the dim illumination from the window. "Come on, two Jews in a kitchen, we've gotta be able to figure that one out. Google it or something."

The signal on Jack's phone works just about long enough for the first couple of words, and he holds up the barely loaded page so she can see it, shrugging helplessly. She reads the words out loud.

"Baruch atah Ado- that's how they _all_ start oh my god."

Jack laughs, bright and loud in the otherwise empty apartments. "C'mon, if we think hard we'll figure it out."

They get through the beginning, the part present in most common Jewish prayers, but trip each other up at the middle, both saying different words that only probably actually mean anything in Hebrew. Eye contact leads to laughter, and Jack shakes his head, picking up the book of matches. He lights the tea light, then passes the match gingerly to Lula, who ignites the votive. The kitchen soon smells like evergreen trees and sounds like joy, Jack and Lula's disjointed voices attempting a half-remembered prayer from a shared childhood experience, one of few good ones they both hold onto.

That's how the others find them when they get home, Jack and Lula sitting at the kitchen table chatting quietly about nothing much at all, the light from two mismatched candles flickering over their faces.


End file.
